


Atchoo!

by etorphine



Category: Death Note (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Gen, Sick Fic, Wammy's Era, this is the fluffiest thing i'll ever write
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-17
Updated: 2019-04-17
Packaged: 2020-01-15 08:35:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18495298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etorphine/pseuds/etorphine
Summary: There was a bad cold going around at Wammy's House.





	Atchoo!

**Author's Note:**

> written in june 2015 for a good friend's birthday present, never posted until now because i'm weird about my writing. enjoy.

There was a bad cold going around at Wammy's House.  
  
All week, Matt had been seeing kids coughing loudly into their elbows and sniffling around the halls. It happened almost every year, when it was starting to get cold in Winchester, only this time it came a little earlier than usual.  
  
It was a really bad time, actually. The half-term tests were starting up in just a week -- the first grades for their year's rankings, and the amount of studying in the library was worsening the transmission.  
  
Which was why, on the Saturday morning, Matt had showed up at the dining hall with a Pikachu flu mask he'd made out of a really old yellow t-shirt that didn't fit anymore, a permanent marker, and an elastic band he cut up. He didn't want whatever the orphanage had because he stayed sick for months, and like hell he was going to spend until Christmas with a sore throat and a runny nose.  
  
"What the hell are you wearing?" Mello asked when he came to his table, twisting his face in disbelief.  
  
Matt slid into the chair, pulling his mask down. "Yeah, laugh it up," Matt said as he peeled open his pudding dessert cup and spooned out half of it in one go. "But we'll see who's laughing when you're coughing your arse off and I'm still fine."  
  
"Yeah, but you look stupid." Mello peered at his face, pulling off his mask and examining it. "With your goggles and stuff. You look like a criminal or something."  
  
"Good. I'm the badass type."  
  
"Where'd you even get this?"  
  
Mello put it on. The mask made it look as if Pikachu's mouth had replaced his, the '3' of his mouth looking creepy with Mello's sharp eyes.  
  
"Made it this morning when you went for your shower + breakfast combo. Hey, don't stretch it out with your big head, arsehole."  
  
"You can barely even breathe in it," Mello grimaced, taking it off and tossing it back at him. "And it smells skanky in there. Did you ever even wash that shirt?"  
  
Matt shrugged, licking his spoon clean of the pudding. "Dunno," he responded, wiping his mouth and putting on the mask again. "But whatever, fuck getting sick, or I won't get better until second term."  
  
"Yeah, boo-hoo for you. I'll be fine. My immune system is really good." Mello gleamed and nodded. "Did you start studying for half-term yet?"  
  
"Uh, no? It's, like, next week. Who cares?"  
  
"You're stupid. You should join me in the library later. I'm gonna be doing calc all day."  
  
"Fuck no, man. Bacteria hotbed. And I have The Adventure of Link to finish." Matt didn't miss Mello's eye-roll.  
  
"Hey, cool mask," a kid from his American Lit class said as he passed by with a tray.  
  
"See?" Matt raised his eyebrows knowingly. "He has taste."  
  
"You're a dunce," Mello replied, pushing his tray towards the middle of the table. "You want my veggies? I hate broccoli."

  
\---

  
Mello studied straight past supper -- like he always did, and it wasn't like he was ever hungry when he ate so much chocolate when he was trying to focus -- so when Matt next saw him, it was lights-out and Mello had hauled an arm-full of textbooks into their shared room.  
  
"How was calc?" Matt asked, already in bed, tossing his Gameboy Advance onto the comforter. "You master that chain rule?"  
  
"Yeah," Mello said, heaving all the textbooks onto the ground with a thump. "Got through three chapters. I'm gonna keep studying tonight, then I can get started on American history."  
  
"You're not sleeping?"  
  
"Maybe later." He turned on the lamp on his desk and unzipped his backpack, but paused. "You were right, though. There really were a  _lot_  of sick people in the library."  
  
"You want me to make you a mask?"  
  
It was too dark to make out Mello's expression, but he had turned towards his bed, and Matt  _knew_  it was a dirty look.  _That_  dirty look; the one Mello gave Near whenever he so much as spoke.  
  
"I'd rather die, but thanks."  
  
Matt shrugged, rolling over. "Your choice."  
  
He tucked his Gameboy under the pillow and got into bed as Mello got ready to study for the night, settling into his old swivel chair with a creak and crackling open some chocolate. It was silent for a few moments before Mello coughed.  
  
"Sorry?" Matt asked, rolling over.  
  
"What," Mello replied, but his tone belied that he knew exactly what Matt was referring to.  
  
"You  _coughed_."  
  
"Yeah, we all do."  
  
"You spent a whole day in a germ-infested space and you're coughing oh fuck oh fuck no." Matt sat up in bed. "I'm getting transferred out."  
  
"You can't do that, Matt," Mello said irritably, turning his chair towards him like a backlit villain in a Bond film. "Roger won't let you now. Anyway, I'm  _fine_. I have a good immune system. I choked on a piece of chocolate."  
  
"You weren't even eating anything!"  
  
Mello grabbed his half-eaten chocolate bar from behind him and waved it around, and coughed a few more times weakly to illustrate his point. "Something was in my throat."  
  
"Yeah, it's called a fucking cold, Mello."  
  
"Shut up and go to bed."  
  
"I'll make you a mask tomorrow," Matt said, lying back down and staring at the ceiling. "It can be black. It'll look cool, alright? You got any spare black cloth?"  
  
"Don't touch any of my clothes," came Mello's icy reply.  
  
"You can't get sick!"  
  
"Trust me, I'm not planning on it." Mello turned back towards his maths work. "Seriously, Matt, you're being a worrywort. I'll be fine."  
  
Matt resolved to trust him, only because they'd known each other for years and he really had never seen Mello get sick once in his life. "Yeah, but," he said, turning around again and tossing the covers over himself. "If you get sick, I'm going to fucking kill you."

  
\---

  
Mello got sick.  
  
Like, balls-deep, motor-engine-rumbling-cough sick. When Matt woke up, it wasn't from Mello's alarm set godawfully early in the morning -- it was from a sound that he thought was from a passing overhead airplane from outside that was flying really,  _really_  low, but it turned out to be Mello having a fit in his bed.  
  
"Holy shit," Matt mumbled, still sleep-ridden. And then, "Mello, are you fucking dying?"  
  
Mello made a weak engine sound in the back of his throat. Matt rolled over and saw that Mello had become a huge round mound of blankets and balled up tissue paper, littering the bed and spilling onto the ground. The tissue box that sat at Mello's desk was now balanced precariously on the window ledge, empty. Another tissue box sat beside it, still full, and Matt recognized it as the one from his side of the room.  
  
"You took my tissues?" he asked, sitting up.  
  
Mello made another weird noise. "Infirmary is closed 'til the morning," he replied, his voice like the little girl from The Exorcist. "I had no other choice."  
  
Matt sighed, running a hand through his hair. "What happened to good immune system?"  
  
"It still is," Mello croaked defensively.  
  
It was one of those situations where Matt knew he could have said something like, "I told you so," or laughed at him for being a dumb baby who couldn't make good decisions, or gotten angry at him for being sick like Mello probably would have done for him, or something like that. And if Mello didn't look so pitiful, he  _really_  might have. But Mello sounded like death, his textbooks were still out on the table as if he'd just collapsed into bed and woke up the next morning all mid-zombie-transformation, and, well, he'd never seen Mello like this before and it was frankly a little scary.  
  
"Alright, the infirmary is probably open now," Matt said, getting up from the bed and glancing at the alarm -- it was 10:04AM, way after breakfast hours, which Mello usually never missed because he liked the chocolate muffins. "What do you need? Tissues, and... cough syrup?"  
  
"They should have something that they give for the cold going around." Mello coughed, and it shook his whole bed. "I want three of what everybody else has."  
  
Matt started getting dressed and grabbed his goggles. He took the Pikachu flu mask and put it on, too, and vowed to spend the rest of the day in it.  
  
"You know you're not going to get any special treatment," Matt said, putting on his socks, his voice muffled by the cloth. "Even if you are second."  
  
"Are you wearing that bloody Sonic mask again?"  
  
"Clearly, I'm gonna need it." Matt pulled it off and hung it at his jaw as he grabbed his bag of toiletries for before the infirmary visit. "And it's Pokemon, you fucking noob."  
  
There was a long pause. "Same thing."  
  
Matt rolled his eyes and put on his shoes. "I'll be back shortly. Don't die on me."  
  
"I'll try not to," Mello said, reaching over to violently yank a tissue out of the box to blow his nose.

  
\---

  
Matt came back half an hour later, quietly opening the door with his key. At the sound, Mello emerged from the covers, his head the only thing on top of a blanket mountain, his usually uniform hair messy and his eyes tired and puffy.  
  
"Woah," Matt couldn't help but mutter.  
  
"Thanks," Mello said, crumpling another tissue and tossing it onto the ground. "Did you die out there? Took you long enough."  
  
Matt scoffed. In reality, the infirmary had a line out the front, and the doctors had to take temperatures before they started handing out cough medicine.  
  
"It was busy as holiday shopping hours in there. Either you come to the infirmary, or you're not getting anything until a second doctor comes in at noon because the first one is fucking flooded with sick kids right now." Matt ripped open a tissue box and placed it in front of Mello's bed. "Got you this, though."  
  
"I'm not leaving my room like this." Mello sat up and wrapped the blanket around him, frowning. "I look so bad."  
  
"You  _look_  bad? You're sick as shit, Mello. Who cares how you look?"  
  
Mello didn't respond, tearing out another tissue to blow his nose. Matt stared at him for a moment, and then realization dawned on him slowly. "Are you afraid of Near seeing you like this?" he asked, slowly. He wasn't sure where his hatred ended and desire to impress Near started, only that the two were interconnected in a weird way. Mello's shoulders stiffened, and Matt knew that he'd guessed right.  
  
"Fuck him."  
  
"I'll blind him, alright?" Matt paused at how stupid that sounded. "I'm pretty sure he's sick right now, anyhow."  
  
Mello snorted. "Really? That bastard can get sick?"  
  
"That's what I thought about you."  
  
"Piss off." Mello unwrapped himself from his coccoon and coughed when he got up to get dressed. "Fine, I'll go, but this better be quick."  
  
"You want the mask now?" Matt asked, heading towards his closet to look at his clothes. "I can make you one in like, three minutes."  
  
"No."  
  
"Alright, fine," Matt said, shrugging. "But Near would seriously get so jealous. You'd look really cool."  
  
"No."  
  
Matt saw him consider it, though, so that was what counted.

  
\---

  
Matt heard Mello's footsteps down the hall before he reached the bedroom door, so he knew that whatever had happened was bad. Then he heard Mello rattling the doorknob before he realized the door was unlocked, and he threw the door open, which let Matt know that whatever happened was  _really_  bad.  
  
"Near is not fucking sick, you liar," Mello said through gritted teeth, kicking the door shut. He slammed down an empty measuring cup with bits of pink syrup still clinging at the end -- he'd taken all of his medicine before he'd even got back. "He's well fine. Just the fine fucking arsehole he always is."  
  
"He was sick yesterday," Matt said, pausing his game. "Coughing up a storm in Programming."  
  
"Well, the arsehole saw me on the way to the fucking infirmary. And he told me to get better before the bloody half-terms with no emotion at all, just so fucking emptily--" Mello growled hoarsely. "Like he was fucking spiting me. Like he was saying, "I hope you piss off and fucking die before your half-terms happen and you fail all your classes." That  _arsehole_. That fucking  _arsehole_."  
  
During his tirade, Mello had begun unzipping his bag and pencil case in a flurry, slamming his stationary on the desk, and threw himself down on the chair, turning around.  
  
"I can't believe I fucking got sick right now of all times," he said, taking out his pencil and staring down at his maths textbook dutifully. "Fuck this."  
  
"There's still a week left until your calc half-term," Matt protested. "You really shouldn't be working right now, Mello, you're badly sick."  
  
"But there's still history, law, lit. I'll fall behind."  
  
Matt chewed his lip behind his mask. "Just rest up today. Just today."  
  
"I  _can't_." Mello sighed, grasping his head. "Ugh, hell. My head is pounding."  
  
"You really shouldn't stress yourself out. You won't get better."  
  
"I have a good immune system. I can do it."  
  
There he went -- the unstoppable, blazing force Mello was known for, sick as he was, still trying to push through. He probably knew it wasn't a good idea. They both did. But he'd gone ahead and gotten upset and now he was going to keep going at it and going at it until he wore himself out or got too sick to go on -- one or the other. He was clenching his pencil so hard his fingers went white. He chewed on his left nail, and then had to break away to cough into his shoulder.  
  
Matt glanced up at the clock. It was a little past noon.  
  
"I'm going to get lunch," he said to Mello's back. "You want something?"  
  
"Peace and quiet," Mello responded sharply.  
  
It was one of those things that Matt knew about Mello -- not to take his words to heart, especially not when he was worked up. But it did sting a little bit.

  
\---

  
When Matt had gotten back after supper, there was a note on the door timestamped from 4:05PM that read "MELLO, PICKUP READY - INFIRMARY." for his second dosage. Beyond it, the room was dark, only the glow of the hallway off the window and the muddy blue dusk sky outside making the rest of the room visible. He could see Mello in bed again, curled up, his work still spread out messily all over the desk.  
  
He dropped off his Gameboy on his desk and took off his facemask, his cheek and chin sweating, and then turned on the lamp before going over to Mello's bed to wake him up. He shook his shoulder and Mello inhaled sharply before blinking his eyes open, and jumped when he registered Matt in front of him. "What time is it?" he asked, his voice sleepy and urgent.  
  
"Sometime after 6," he answered. "I got you something for supper."  
  
"When did I fall asleep?" Mello asked again, rubbing his eyes.  
  
"Dunno. I was out all day."  
  
"You? Out?"  
  
"I think you wanted some time alone," Matt said. "How are you feeling?"  
  
"Um..." Mello sat up, having changed sometime after Matt had left into a black tank top. He coughed a few times. "My head feels like shit."  
  
"Your voice sounds better, I think."  
  
He cleared his throat. "Yeah, my throat feels better. Good immune system, see?"  
  
Matt chuckled and placed the tray on the floor, sitting down cross-legged beside his bed. "You hungry?"  
  
"Yeah..."  
  
"'Cuz you didn't eat all day, you twit." Matt took off a makeshift lid of a paper plate from a bowl. "They had chicken noodle soup. For all the sick kids, I guess?"  
  
"Their chicken soup is watery crap," Mello said, grimacing, but he took the bowl anyway with a plastic spoon Matt had stolen from the dining hall. He skimmed the surface and blew lightly to cool it down. "So what'd you do all day?"  
  
"Um... played Soul Calibur on the Dreamcast in the Common Room for a few hours. And I finally beat The Adventure of Link."  
  
"You could have done that in here."  
  
"Yeah, but you were on studying lockdown, so." Matt shrugged. "What about you? Finish maths?"  
  
"No," Mello said, stirring the soup around. "No, I think I finished one chapter and then passed out. The cough syrup they gave is pretty mad. You know, I had a dream we were living in a really cheap house together and L was coming to visit so we were trying to get our house cleaned up but it just looked like shit no matter what. Our stairs were broken, we had to leap up on the second floor and sometimes we didn't make it and I broke my nose trying to jump up."  
  
"Sounds rough."  
  
"Yeah, pretty rough." Mello put the soup down on his lap. "And I think you're mad at me."  
  
Matt looked up. "Me?"  
  
"Yeah. I can see it, even past your stupid goggles." Mello sighed, staring down at him for a moment with intense eyes, his face orange from the lamplight. "Where's your ugly mask?"  
  
"It was too hot."  
  
"I'm not contagious anymore, so don't worry." Mello looked up and squinted into the lamp, and then away towards the door. "I didn't mean to lock you out the room or anything."  
  
"Yeah, I know."  
  
"I--"  
  
"Hey, stop trying to make this cheesy or something," Matt finally cut in. "I'm not pissed off. I got you supper, didn't I? I know what you're like, you nutter."  
  
Mello put the chicken noodle soup down on the ground, still half-full. "It's shit," he mumbled. "That cafe we ate at on the London trip last year was better."  
  
"Well, I couldn't go all the way to London to get that for you."  
  
"What else is there?"  
  
"Meatloaf and mashed."  
  
"They always have the best food on Sundays," Mello said wistfully. "Pass me the mashed?"  
  
Matt handed it the plate up to him with a fork, taking off the other plate lid. Mello grinned when he saw Matt had made it into a gravy volcano.  
  
"I was worried you forgot the gravy," Mello admitted, setting it down on his lap.  
  
"Never."  
  
There was a silence that followed as Mello poked at the side of mashed potatoes, spilling the gravy all over his plate. He didn't seem hungry at all, staring at his food like he was trying to have a contest with it. "Hey, Matt..." he said softly, his voice still crackling hoarsely from the sickness.  
  
"Yeah?"  
  
"Thanks."  
  
Matt ducked his head. "No problem, man."  
  
"For... I guess..." Mello cut the volcano in half, watching the gravy rivulets roll down his fork tines. "You know, the last time I got sick, I was six."  
  
"That's a long time ago."  
  
"Yeah. It's just nice to have someone to take care of me when I'm feeling bad."  
  
"You're making things cheesy again, Mel," Matt said, getting up from the ground. "Should have left it at thanks. I'm gonna go shower. You enjoy your mashed."  
  
"I feel dirtier than you." Mello frowned, putting down the plate on his bed. "I haven't showered all day."  
  
"Do it tomorrow when you feel better."  
  
Mello sat quietly in the bed when Matt got all his things, staring at his mountain of food as it got cold, not eating it. Matt decided to forgo the mask this time -- it was way too hot, anyway -- and looked back before he left.  
  
"You want the light on?"  
  
"Oh, yeah," Mello replied, and Matt turned on the light, washing them finally with enough brightness to see that Mello's skin had returned somewhat its normal colour. His nose was still pink though, and he coughed again, grabbing a tissue. "Wait, Matt, before you go..."  
  
"Huh?"  
  
"If you get sick," Mello started, and then interrupted the thought by blowing his nose. "If you also get sick, I'd wanna help you, too."  
  
Matt blinked, and then shook his head. "No, you arsehole. If I get sick, I'm going to fucking kill you and everybody else in this bloody orphanage."  
  
Mello smiled. "Deal."

  
\---

  
The next morning, Mello's alarm began to buzz at 7:00 AM, just as Matt's did on his side of the bed. When Matt woke up, something felt wrong as fuck.  
  
"Mello," he tried to say, but instead it came out as a croak. "Mello!"  
  
"Huh?" came the sleepy reply, the buzzer clumsily turned to snooze. "What's wrong?"  
  
Instead of an answer, Matt reeled back and sneezed. Loudly.  
  
"Oh, fuck," Mello mumbled, followed by a cough. "Oh,  _fuck_."


End file.
